Zendesk Gather is a community forum solution that expands and improves support by empowering customers to connect and collaborate with one another. Gather empowers teams to solicit the help they need from an active and engaged community, creating a channel to harness customers’ expertise, aggregate best practices, and promote feedback.
Gather complements the knowledge base in your help center. You must have Guide before you can use Gather to set up your community. See Getting started with Guide for more information on setting up Guide.
This article covers the following topics:
- About the community structure
- Setting up the community
- Viewing and testing your community
- Activating the community
About the community structure
The community is where you can create and comment on posts to pose questions, provide answers, or share ideas.
Posts are associated with discussion topics.
Community posts can include ideas, tips, or any other community items. Answers can include observations, clarifications, praise, or any other response that's part of a typical community discussion.
Setting up the community
If you do not have a live help center, but are working on your help center in setup mode, the community is activated by default in setup mode. You can set up and test your community at the same time as the rest of your help center and then activate the help center when you're ready.
If you already have a live help center, and you are adding a community, the community is not activated by default. You need to activate it to work with the content. If you do not want the community to be visible to end users while you are setting it up, you need to remove the links to your community in your theme.
Set up the community
- Think about how to make the community successful. See Best practices: Six things to think about before setting up a community.
- Create community discussion topics. See Adding discussion topics.
- Consider seeding your discussion topics with posts. See Making posts in the community.
- Understand how to manage the community that you are creating. See Managing community discussion topics and Managing community posts.
- Think about other community features that might be useful to your organization, for example, community moderators. See Creating community moderator groups.
When you have your community set up, you're ready to view and test it.
Viewing and testing your community
If you don't have a live help center, and you are working on your help center in setup mode, you can use either of these options to view and test the content in your community.
- Use the community directly to view and test your content (managing community topics).
- Use the Themes page in Guide to work with your content (see previewing your help center theme).
If you have a live help center, and you are adding a community, follow these steps to view and test your community.
- Activate your community.
- Hide your community links using the Themes page in the Customize design (
) page in Guide (see customizing your help center theme). - Use the community directly to view and test your content (managing community topics).
After you've finished testing, remember to remove any content that you don't want to be visible to customers.
Activating the community
To activate the community
- In Guide, click the Settings (
) icon in the sidebar, then select Gather settings. - Select Activate community.
- Click Save.
The community is now live to end users in your help center. You can disable the community by deselecting the Activate community check box.
25 Comments
I have a couple of questions about the Community feature. We've had Zendesk Help Center (Guide) for many years and have not activated the Community feature. We have several brands on our instance with different Help Centers. Questions:
Thanks!
Hi @...,
1. I think this is on purpose, to let you work on community appearance without actually enabling it.
2. The community is enabled/disabled per brand. In the top of the screen you select which brand you're currently doing settings for:
Thank you for your quick response, Kasper! I did manage to find the brand setting for activating community.
Currently, we allow all signed-in users to access the Help Center. Mainly so they can see their open support tickets and create new ones.
We're thinking about enabling the Gather/Community feature as well, but I would like to limit it to only a subset/segment of our customers.
In the page hc/admin/general_settings there's a setting called "limit to user segment" that limits the entire help center to a user segment of my choice.
I would like to have the same option for the Community. Is that possible in any way?
The option described by @... above does not restrict access to the Community, only to the topics in the Community. So with that solution, anyone could access the Community but would be limited in what they see. That's not what I want.
Hello @...,
Please note that this is unfortunately not possible.
We can only restrict the topics, but not the whole Community.
For more info:
Applying user segments to restrict viewing access to community content
I would like to be able to create a Gather Forums community and practice in and test it before we take it live to our organization.
We are Subscribed to the following Zendesk products:
Support - Professional
Guide - Light
Gather - Professional
Explore - Legacy
The steps I have taken are as follows:
Still, every time I do #1 and #2 it goes to 'Gather' Settings.
Thank you all for the help.
Hi Bryan,
Do you have your Guide set up as well? You have to have Guide set up as that is how your users enter into the Gather product. You may have to check in on your product level for Guide to see if it allows for Gather - I'm not sure if it's available on the Light version. You can also use this article for some more Guide setup details - https://support.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/articles/203664346.
Thanks,
Maggie
Hello Maggie,
Thank you so much for getting back to me. We had originally received a quote from our Zendesk Account Executive to add Gather Professional to our list of Zendesk Products.
However, after my employer processed the purchase order, the AE reached out via email and wrote, "My Operations team has notified me that "Guide Lite" must be a part of the service order when purchasing Gather Professional". We added "Guide Lite" along with "Gather Professional".
Hello Maggie,
Thank you so much for sending the link to the article, "Guide Help". Yes, our help center is already enabled. We would simply like to train our support staff and allow them to practice in "Gather Professional" before activating it which would make it available to all of our users if I am not mistaken.
Any additional help on how to accomplish this would be great.
Hi,
Yes, once you activate it in your live version, then it will be available to all your users. You could hide your Guide Topics by user segment but I think there will still be a Gather link on your main page that would result in a blank page for all your users. If you are familiar with code, you could hide the link from the main page but that would require some technical expertise to do.
To avoid doing anything that involves changing code, the only other option is to turn it on in your sandbox. Your internal users would have to access this link separately from your live instance but it would let them work in Gather without exposing it to your users.
Thanks,
Maggie
Hey
Is this possible to create multiple forms as someone mentioned in the below post:
https://support.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/articles/4408845814170/
I was just looking for it. But in this post, no proper answer is mentioned.
Thanks in advance for helping me.
May I know your specific question regarding multiple ticket forms? I checked the article that you attached below but it redirected me to an article about how I can use user segments to restrict viewing access to community content.
Hi all, I am wondering if it's possible to have a different theme in our community area to our normal help centre? We want to promote the community with a different vibe. If it looks the exact same as our regular knowledge base we fear it won't get much interest. Does anyone have thoughts on this?
And any guidance on just generally customising the community page itself? We'd love to put a tag line about where all of the topics appear.
Thanks
Christian
Thanks for posting your question to the Community. You can definitely play around with the styling of your Community page by directly editing the code in the Theme Customization located in Guide Admin.
After selecting Customize on the desired theme, you'll see 2 buttons in the lower right corner Edit Code & Publish. You'll just want to select Edit Code and you'll have access to the CSS stylesheet and all of the corresponding Community Page files.
Hope this helps!
Best,
Erica
Hey
Is this possible to create multiple forms as someone mentioned in the below post:
https://support.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/articles/4408845814170/
Hello Zain, thank you for your question!
I'm afraid I was not able to find any mention of forms on the article you linked, but I can confirm that you can indeed create multiple ticket forms in order to have different types of tickets, as explained here: Creating multiple ticket forms to support different request types. All you need to keep in mind is that this is only included in subscriptions of Zendesk Suite: Growth and above, or Zendesk Support Enterprise.
I hope this was helpful!
Hello. Plan Availability does not include 'Growth' following your first screenshot. Why? Is it possible to add it for Growth Suite? Following this link: https://support.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/articles/4762263171610-Announcing-Guide-legacy-reporting-upgrade-to-Explore- the impact is the comments will be no more automatically reachable without the Community tab ('Gather' not available for Growth). Thanks.
Hi Oliver,
If it's not available on your current plan, the only way to have it is to upgrade your subscription. It's not like any other feature that has an add-on.
We have over 7 years of topics and posts in our Community. How can we archive topics which have not been contributed for over 2 years without manually reviewing every post? I cannot see any way to do this to prevent 'dead' posts re-opening...
Being able to bulk archive community topics is not a native functionality for Gather.
Right now, there is no archiving option in Gather. The closest thing we can do to achieve that. What we recommend is to create a topic that is visible only to Agents and Admins and then move posts you do not want visible to the general public into that topic to sort of "archive" it.
There is a topic ID endpoint in the Help Center API, if you have a developer you can write a custom script that could change the topic IDs for a list of posts over to your "archive" topic.
More information on our Help Center API can be found here: topic_id
For topics, you might use user segments to restrict the access for those topics :user_segment_id
While this is not yet available natively within Zendesk, what I can do is share your feedback with the Product Team. The best way for this feature request to get traction is for you to also provide product feedback so that other customers who want the same feature can upvote the post. The feature request and the votes would definitely be helpful so that the Product Managers would consider this in future roadmaps.
Thank you so much for your patience and understanding.
Hi Julio
With over 7 years of history - that is a very long, laborious, manual process with no easy way to identify which threads to adjust if like most people using Zendesk have limited or no knowledge or resources to have a developer perform an API call to grab the info required.
I understand the situation. Normally, to gather data and make changes in bulk is better via API, as the process can be automated.
I've marked this interaction as product feedback for review, which means that your input will be aggregated as a part of our Voice of the Customer program that provides customer feedback to our product development teams.
In addition, I encourage you to create a new post in the General Product Feedback topic in our community to engage with other users who have similar needs and discuss possible workarounds. Conversations with a high level of engagement ultimately get flagged for product managers to review when they go through roadmap planning.
Specific examples, details about impact, and how you currently handle things are helpful for our product teams to understand the full scope of the need when working on solutions. You may also want to review the Product feedback guidelines and how to write an effective feedback post [https://support.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/articles/4413820079386-Giving-Product-Feedback-at-Zendesk-].
We truly value customer feedback and your voice and votes in the forums help influence future Zendesk functionality.
Sincerely,
Hi Julio H,
Reading over some of the comments from 2021 and wondering if what I am trying to achieve below is now possible.
We have three different regions (North America, UK , APAC) on our instance of Zendesk, all with different customers and products. I am planning to roll gather out only to the APAC region.
I would like to activate gather and have it only accessible to a limited cohort of users for a trial. How do I achieve this?
The key thing I'm worried about is activating the community in the Gather settings and then all users being able to access it (that will be a mess!). It would be helpful to understand what happens when the community is activated, I can't see if this is described anywhere.
Thanks, Sam
Hi Julio H,
I would like to do something similar to Sam. Same same but different.
We have the community set up and running. It is available publicly, but to modify (post vote etc) the user must be logged in. We have a verification process ensuring only customers and trial users can post, vote etc. Zero posting for anonymous, but can read.
Problem I need to solve:
Some customers want to use the forum but not have it posted publicly and won't use it unless we have a private section with only real customers and our people being able to see it. This must only be accessible by verified users (customers, trial user and our staff.)
But I still want the rest of the community to remain searchable and readable for anon.
How can I set up a public and private community where verified end users (customers) can post in relative privacy?
Thanks a lot for any advice,
Adam
I would recommend using User Segments to help restrict access to certain topics within your community. This article should also help: Applying user segments to restrict viewing access to community content
If you want anonymous users to be able to read and search your public content, you'll want to make sure require sign-in is not enabled in your Help Center settings.
Let me know if this doesn't get you what you're looking for!
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